Employee onboarding program

Overview

This 90 day onboarding program helped scale a small agency from 10 to 20 people in six months.

Responsibilities: Instructional design, development, slide creation, project management setup, facilitating the first 30 days

Target Audience: New employees of the agency

Tools Used: Google Slides, Google Docs, Google Meet, Teamwork task list templates, HubSpot, Slack

Client: Remotish

Year: 2021

Problem

The company forecasted growth and a need to hire employees quickly to support the new or expanded clients. This business is an agency, so the product is its people. We needed to hire more people in order to service more clients as opposed to only using other methods of scale or efficiency to support the growth. We also had been having a problem with team members not understanding how best to be successful at the company after a significant amount of time on the job.

Agencies typically have very little or no employee onboarding, so there isn't a standard industry-wide onboarding program to follow. A Remotish onboarding program existed, but it was minimal and lasted for approximately two weeks, sometimes while simultaneously doing client work. Though that existing program was improved before every new employee started, the company experienced little turnover in its first two years and previously never predicted this speed of growth or a need to hire more than one team member at a time.

Solution

We improved the onboarding process in 2021 to include:

30 days of standard onboarding, where every new team member learns about the whole company
30 additional days of onboarding, the team member learns more specific topics and skills for their role, ramping up to a 50% workload capacity by the end of the second month
30 more days where the team member ramps up to the 75% core work capacity or billable utilization, where they are doing 100% of their role responsibilities

The first 30 days: Learning all about the company & culture

The first 30 days of onboarding use a variety of educational formats to deliver information about the company, culture, how to succeed, and more important topics that are often rushed through or ignored at other companies. This variety of methods accommodates all learning preferences and speeds of team members. It also helps people from different career paths, industries, or countries have time to adjust.

The program includes:

At least one live call a day to help the new employee feel belonging and support.
- Though it is a camera-optional company, to help support people's mental health, the senior Remotish team member has their camera on during these calls so the new team member feels like there is a human caring for them.
- Limiting the live call schedule to one call a day also means we can accommodate most time zones or preferred working times. This ensures new employees are not put at a disadvantage based on where they live or based on their existing schedules for other parts of their lives.

Most calls have related knowledge-base wiki articles to read, and related tasks to complete for hands-on learning.
The ~40 HubSpot Academy certifications, which use videos and other learning formats, are a big focus during this time. Earning these certifications helps unlock a big benefit: reduced working hours (30-hour workweeks).
During their first month, new team members spend about 30 hours shadowing all types of calls across the company, a mix of recorded calls and live calls according to their preferred flexible schedule. This gives the new team members a broad lens on the entire customer journey and inner workings of the agency, to better understand how their role fits into the company and the value of their work.
One of the ways information is repeated, to encourage retention of information and support neurodiversity, is a 15-day email workflow covering some of the most important company information.
Our Knowledge Base contains 160+ articles we’ve built, improved, and updated since our first year in business. Knowing how to do something at Remotish does not depend on seniority or tenure. This extensive documentation gives new employees a better sense of security or belonging. They know they can self-service to find the answers, at any time of day. The articles are also useful for employees whose native language is not English, where understanding writing may be easier to comprehend or faster to translate compared to verbal responses. Information is accessible and transparent across time zones, departments, and job levels. The new employee has a task to read through relevant articles in this Knowledge Base and become familiar with using it.
Other tasks for the first 30 days include:
- Creating a "How to Work with Me" document that is shared with the team
- Having an individual "Get to know you" call with every member of the company (This is many team members' favorite part of month 1)
- Creating their About page on the Remotish website, so they are in control of how they appear to the world as a member of our team, and they control how soon it is published
- Being added to all client Slack channels to see conversations happening in real-time (week 2) with a task to add a comment or question daily to improve their understanding and not be hesitant of publicly commenting. All team members also have access to all projects in our project management system, to be able to learn what's going on.
- Reviewing all client brief documents that tell the backstory, personality notes, and progress of each client
- Meeting with our HubSpot channel consultant and channel account manager to learn more about HubSpot partnerships

The most tenured employee (myself), who built the knowledge base, runs the onboarding program. This allows Remotish to efficiently deliver the context and historical information that employees need to be able to quickly understand the big picture and WHY we run the business and processes a certain way.

This senior team member also runs a live Slack chat for the new team member during the weekly team meeting, to provide context to the conversation and help the new team member feel less lost.

We built in many public posts and internal messages to celebrate the new employee, as well as a welcome gift, to help increase feelings of belonging and inclusion. We also provide many opportunities and encouragement for the new team member to give us feedback on how to improve the onboarding for the next person, and we show that we take action on their advice.

Though there is a lot of structure and education to help employees succeed faster, there is also a lot of time for the team members to explore information, giving people the time they need to succeed.

Week-by-week schedule for month 1

Week 1 (Day 1 - Day 5)

Welcome meeting
Two more calls to teach about how we use our systems
Call about People and Culture
Call to meet the CEO Nicole
Call for an end of week check-in
Call for an intro to your manager
Task to learn about the password manager Bitwarden
Certifications - A LOT! Do them now while you have the time!
Set up getting-to-know-you calls with everyone on the team and start having the calls
Creating Your About Me website page
Reading wikis (HubSpot knowledge base articles)
Interacting with the team on Slack and asking questions

Week 2 (Day 6 - 10)

Call with manager and ops to introduce you to the role
Call about mentorship (or a recording and 15-minute live question and answer session (Q&A))
Call or recording about our services/products, what we sell
Call about the sales process (or a recording and 15-minute live Q&A)
Call about the service process
Call to check in with your manager
Call to check in with ops
HubSpot Certifications
Starting shadowing(listening) to one type of each call across the whole company (15 hours)
Reading client brief documents
Interacting with the team on Slack and gathering/asking questions

Week 3 (Day 11 - 15)

Call about Operations (recording and live Q&A, combined with Referral partner Q&A)
Call about being a HubSpot Partner Agency (or a recording and live Q&A)
Call about our Referral Partner Program (recording and live Q&A)
Call about marketing, brand, and positioning (recording and Slack questions)
Daily calls with their manager (may be short, 5-15 mins)
Call to check in with ops
Certifications
Continuing shadowing/listening to one type of each all we have across the whole company
Posting questions in client Slack channels
Interacting with the team on Slack and gathering/asking questions

Week 4 (Day 16 - 20)

Call with manager & ops to reveal a customized month 2-3 onboarding plan for your role
Daily calls with their manager
Call to check in with ops
Certifications
Finishing general shadowing, starting to shadow more calls related to your role
Posting questions in client Slack channels
Interacting with the team on Slack and gathering/asking questions
Finishing your tasks in the Onboarding Teamwork task template in Remotish Operations

The second 30 days: Being supported while stepping into the role

The second month starts with an email handoff from the operations/onboarding manager to the team member's manager to make it clear and official that the team member's manager is leading this month of onboarding and beyond!
The new team member's completion of month 1 is also celebrated throughout company communications.
The team member continues to shadow calls, now concentrating on calls related to their role.
Though month 2 work looks different for every role, they may have tasks for practice projects directly related to client or sales work they'll take over soon. They may be assigned an experienced team member as a buddy to help them kick off their first client or sale.
They have many check-in communications with their manager for support. The manager also asks for feedback from other team members to make sure the new team member is doing as well as possible.
The new team member's check-in calls with operations, which were weekly during month 1, are reduced to bi-weekly.
The new team member continues to work on their certifications in order to qualify for reduced work soon.

This month they aim to be working at 50% utilization by the end of the month, so 50% of their time will be client time (billable), or 50% of their time logged in their core work area such as in Sales or Operations.

The third 30 days: Ramping up to doing 100% of the role

During the third month after hiring, one of the final onboarding tasks is to create a backup plan. This is a document that explains what they do in their role daily, weekly, and monthly, with links to knowledge base articles that give further instructions on how to complete those tasks. This allows team members to enjoy their flex-time and get ready to enter their reduced work hours in the next few months since this document allows other team members to easily take over their day-to-day work without lengthy phone calls or individual note-taking to "catch up" on what they are working on. Our method of using project management tools, HubSpot, and a general culture of documentation & transparency make it possible to take time off without the employee, agency, or clients and contacts suffering.
The third month is also when the new team member starts doing 100% of the activities for their role by the end of the month. This includes spending 75% of their time in client work (billable) or doing work in their core function such as Sales or Operations. We want to give our team enough time (25%) to continue education, attend team meetings, log their time and check general communications, contribute to our marketing, network, and other "being an employee" activities.
During this time, they ease down to the regular schedule of weekly check-in calls with their manager, with one-off calls or Slack as needed.
They complete the customized month 2-3 onboarding plan for the role
They work on finishing 30 certifications by the end of month 3, in order to earn reduced work benefits soon! If they finish all certifications early, they could start their three-month qualification period earlier. 100% of certifications are due month 4.

Examples:

Process

Analysis: Researched the gaps in current team knowledge after the shorter onboarding, looked into resources needed to create the program, and researched what other companies offered
Design: Decided how the content and activities would be presented and reinforced, including how many and what types of calls, how to utilize Teamwork task templates, what types of tasks to have the employee perform, how to best remind people of important information in multiple formats multiple times, how to allow people to learn at their own pace while feeling supported especially for employees new to remote work and asynchronous work
Development: Created and tested the sequence of everything, as well as the individual pieces of slides, surveys, project management tasks, communications, and other materials. This included an email workflow of important content reminders.
Implementation: Began running the program and asking for feedback, improving and adjusting as we went along for the first two people to go through the program at the same time
Evaluation: Weekly check-in calls also asked for program feedback to improve their experience, as well as emails asking for improvements after each month and a survey after the three months ended.
Continuous Improvement: Making feasible improvements on a regular basis, documenting larger improvement feedback for the future, and continuing to improve and iterate.

Results & Takeaways

Positive parts of onboarding mentioned in surveys:

Getting to know everyone in 1-1 calls and Slack, how it's built-in
Structure and knowing roadmap of onboarding, onboarding content/decks
Freedom/time/focus to learn
Learning processes of Remotish, the ins and outs of the company
How optimized it was, using HubSpot automation for emails, for example
Feeling successful even when given clients “early” by our standards
That Remotish stayed true to word about hours, how we work, transparency, there was no bait and switch from what we say during hiring
Being supported by the onboarding manager
Learning how a HubSpot agency works
Being asked for improvements and seeing the improvements take place

Feedback we used to make improvements:

People wanted more role-specific work or info, such as a typical week in the role or how to onboard a client
- We learned that some team managers did not have time to create the role-specific work for months 2 and 3, so we hired a people ops person to help them create these plans. This was also added as a topic for future manager training.
- This work was also requested since a manager was confused about the 50% capacity by the end of month 2, and instead was giving the team members new clients on day 1 of month 2 instead of ramping them up to doing client work. When we eliminated this confusion, the requests to learn client servicing work sooner decreased. This was another topic to add to a future manager-specific onboarding, explaining how onboarding works from the manager's perspective.
- We also solved this issue by giving people a “buddy” who was in the same role on their team to shadow during month 2, to learn more about the role
People asked for more useful client brief documents to learn the history and context of current clients or returning clients
- Through this feedback, we learned that some team members were not filling the documents out thoroughly and that the manager was not checking or helping the team make sure the briefs were complete and helpful
- We introduced more accountability measures for both team members and managers to make sure this critical document was thorough and complete
- Once the newest onboarded team members were working in their client-facing roles, they did a good job filling these out after seeing the importance during onboarding
People wanted less service call shadowing for non-service team members
- We streamlined the call shadowing template so it’s easier to see which calls are optional, and customized it for each role
People wanted to see the CEO in more content or videos
- We solved this with monthly CEO fireside chats so team members can attend live and watch previous ones
People wanted more tasks added to week 3-4 to break up the certification time
- We added more tasks and role-specific call shadowing/recordings these weeks
People asked for more recordings instead of live calls
- We did this by providing live or recorded options for call shadowing, once we had specific types of calls recorded. We also recorded a few of the onboarding calls and paired them with a 15-minute live Q&A about the topic, for their live human call for the day.

We did not have employee satisfaction scores or measurements in place before the program was created, and we did not track retention due to improved onboarding, but those would be good improvements for future onboarding program creation.

A part-time employee onboarding program and international contractor onboarding were also created, based on this program.

A manager onboarding and a re-onboarding or refresher training were started before I left the company.

Information from the yearly review of operations projects, self-reported:

Project: Create a new onboarding program and run it

Operations goals	Score 0-3	Score Explanation
Use of tooling and processes	3	We are using a lot of our tools to create and manage this onboarding process, including wikis, calendar, slides for standard calls, teamwork task templates, automated emails, and more.
Increased efficiency	3	Going through this new onboarding program should make all team members more efficient
Increased data points	2	Most of the data is tracking the time it takes to finish tasks, and qualitative data, such as feedback for improvements
Impact on revenue	1	In theory, the team members will be more successful and faster at reaching their full potential influencing revenue, but we aren’t 100% sure if the delay before they start being billable improved their efficiency and success enough to compare to people who were billable their first month (who may not be as efficient or successful for a few months). We don’t have data to prove this program helps revenue retention or creation in the long-term, though it likely helps with retaining team members.
Impact on number of leads	1	Due to increased marketing about our new team members that is built into onboarding, and the time for the team members to make social posts and emphasis on thought leadership, it is possible the program has a little impact on increased revenue
Impact on customer success	2	In theory this program should make the team happier and make them more successful when they start selling to or servicing clients, which makes customers more happy and successful. Nothing falls through the cracks due to bad time management or attention to detail or not knowing processes or where to find info...
TOTAL	12	The highest score possible is 18

Robby

In an article drafted about his experience starting to work for Remotish:

"I’ve done the whole agency life. Most agencies don’t invest in onboarding. They expect you to come into the position with the knowledge, skills, and experience to jump right into the work. Imagine my surprise when I accepted my position here as a Digital Project Strategist that I would not actually be interacting with clients until about six weeks into my time at Remotish. The entire first month was spent learning HubSpot and obtaining certifications, learning their systems and processes, shadowing calls, and interacting with team members. One of our first major assignments was to schedule one to one calls with the entire team.

We were skillfully guided through the onboarding process by Jen and the Operations team with multiple check-ins, discussions on how to do various aspects of the job, and were constantly asked how to improve the process. I remember during one session a member of my onboarding class (four of us that all started within the same two week period) made a suggestion and they live edited their onboarding process to make it better for the next person. There was no, “Well, this is how it’s always been done.” There was, “Thank you! Great suggestion!”

Education Program